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| This history of German/Austrian/Swiss-German literature and thought has been intertwined with the historical formation of sexual discourse and contemporary debates on sexuality. This course traces the dynamics of sexual relations and policies through the changing cultural and political landscape of modernity. We examine a range of works, often pioneering and provocative ones, from some subperiod(s) within modernity in the broad sense, roughly from the Reformation forward. We consider how sexual norms and gender roles are (re)negotiated and (re)constructed over time by established institutional practices and various modes of social resistance. We will become familiar with new forms of representation and interpretation in contexts such as the rise of the nuclear family in bourgeois modernity, the rise of feminism, the emergence of psychoanalytic thought, the German avant-garde, the thematizations of incest, queer film, and social advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights. Primary course materials will include works of literature, theoretical essays, and films and/or other works of creative art. Authors considered may include, for example: Lessing, Lenz, Büchner, Wedekind, Andreas-Salomé, Schnitzler, Freud, Hirschfeld, von Sacher-Masoch, and Fassbinder. This course fulfills the Arts and Letters requirement, as it introduces students to the methods of reading literature and theory characteristic of literary and philosophical disciplines. It fulfills the Multicultural Group requirement for Identity, Pluralism, and Tolerance, because it deals with historical tensions between normative and nonnormative modes of sexuality in a given context, with connections between sexuality and race, class, and national identity, and because it explores issue of tolerance and (in some historical instances) intolerance in relation to sexuality as connected to these other dimensions. |
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